Rel-canonical tag

[aircyclemegan]

Hi, I'm having some confusion with the rel-canonical tag. A few months ago we implemented the rel-canonical tag because we had many errors specifically duplicate page content come upon the SEOmoz web  app (mostly because we use tracking code). I had asked what to do about this and was advised by the SEOmoz web app to implement the rel-canonical tag.

However, when I'm working on the Keyword Optimizer Tool, it always checks off that I'm using the rel-canonical tag improperly, and then when I go into our sites' CMS for that page and uncheck "Use Canonical URL", the keyword optimizer tool up's my grade for that correction/that I've made an improvement.

So my question is if the page I'm working on is the one I want search engines to find, should I not be using the Canonical URL tag? Should the Canonical URL tag only be used on URL's with the tracking code?

[Cyle]

Is the URL you are putting in the rel=canonical tag pointing to the page you want to rank?

[Dan-Petrovic]

It's safe to include rel="canonical" on all canonical versions of your site and will not cause any problems. I have done this and tested many times. If you run a template based website such as WordPress it would be much easier if all pages referred to their own canonical version (even if it be itself).